Oracle Blog

Social Networking, software, trends and more

Monday Aug 18, 2008

We're trying to get the word out about Project SocialSite so of course we're happy to get a mention in Matt Asay's popular open source blog at CNET,
The Open Road, even if Matt has a "hard time wrapping" his "brain around how this fits into the larger Sun story."
Matt wonders what we're doing and seems to think we're goofing around. We're not, we think social networking is an important part of web application and identity infrastructure. Seriously

Bob Bickel of social networking application server company
Ringside Networks
seems to agree. Here's what he wrote in the comments of Matt's post:

Bob Bickel: The way we see the market going is that there are an emerging set of API's and infrastructure software needed to enable a website to become social. One of those API's is Open Social, and the Shindig project implements this. You could kind of view Shindig as equal to the old Sun Reference Implementations of like J2EE, and SocialSite as a production implementation.

That's not a bad characterization of what we're doing, but SocialSite is much more than just Shindig. We're adding things like a flexible data-model implementation, a complete UI for social networking in the form of widgets, REST API extensions, the ability to enable existing apps and the list goes on.